Slightly condensed… Hat tip: Punkey

The only shops open in the morning when I wake up are bakeries and kiosks. I like that, since many days I go downstairs to buy some fresh bread for breakfast, once in a while accompanied with a newspaper. When I come home from my work, almost all shops are closed. I don’t like that, since many days I need something, and I will have to wait until Saturday to buy it. Or better: I’ll have to wait for the first Saturday on which I have time. Sometimes I work on Saturdays, sometimes I am in Holland on Saturdays, sometimes we have visitors on Saturdays, and sometimes I have to buy more important things on Saturdays… This Saturday I hope to have some time to do some shopping, but am afraid that once again I won’t have the time for it. I want to bring my suit to the chemical cleaner, I want to develop the pictures we made in Easter, and I want to buy a new cellphone. And as a true gadget freak, it itches to know that you really need a new gadget (my old phone is completely destroyed), and probably won’t have the time to buy it! :-(

> Ik haat het om geblinddoekt te worden. Al met al een geslaagd vrijgezellenfeest. Vrij naar John

Bags packed… Some hours of sleep… Air plane to Amsterdam… Arriving in Harmelen… Relaxing…. Tourist in my former country…

One of the problems of using the XHTML 1.1 doctype is the fact that your pages need to be completely valid in order to be displayed. If there is one single error in the XHTML code, the browser will display an error message. This in difference with HTML and XHTML 1.0 pages, which browsers will try to show even if the code contains errors. Of course, all my templates contain valid code, but the problem comes when I or my commenters use code in my texts. It is always the parts that are not automated where the problems appear :-( The number one error screwing up my valid pages is the use of ampersands (&). Since ampersands have a special meaning in XHTML, you’ll have to enter the entity code & to display an ampersand. In my texts I don’t use many ampersands, but many URL´s do contain ampersands. And usually URL’s are simply copied and pasted from the browser address bar, without verifying the address, resulting in an error message instead of a link. But now I hope I solved this problem. I just installed the latest version of the SafeHref plugin, which automagically repairs this error.

YRCHTVOL is still a difficult thing to understand for most people in the web-business: Single Input – Multiple Outputs.

Now that I am back home again and took some time to catch some sleep, it’s time to tell about the CeBIT experience. It was my first time at the biggest technology fair in the world, and the first time ICG was present with their own stand. Therefore I did not really know what to expect. I assumed to see many new things, but not in the area where we have our stand. The POS world is a niche market after all. Since we never did this before, we did not spend huge amounts of money on the stand. We simply ordered a basic stand and transported all other materials ourselves. That meant that we spent two days on the autoroutes and autobahn and one day constructing the stand. As a result, we were already tired before the show started, and looked very jealously at all consultants freshly arriving at the Microsoft stand and finding their cup of coffee already prepared. Like I already said, our stand was situated in a specialized POS corner, so the big public did probably not pass our stand. However, the people walking around in that particular section were exactly the people we wanted to talk to. We made many good contacts, and we have very good hopes on a good number of dealer wanting to distribute our software. What surprised us was the change in visitor types by day. On the first two days (Thursday and Friday), the audience was very international. We attended people from all over the world, but did not see many Germans. In the weekend, many students and families visited the show, which did not bring us many contacts. Monday and Tuesday suddenly the Germans and Dutch showed up, while the foreigners seemed to have gone home. On Wednesday the only visitors to the show were some teenagers begging for goodies, so it was very quiet. This made the Wednesday a perfect day to visit other exhibitors, and they also visited us. What I really missed at the CeBIT was the new technology buzz. I did not notice any excitement, did not see a single new gadget. It was even very difficult to get internet access. I expected it to be a lot more on the forefront of technology.

The last week we have worked very hard. Not only to prepare for the CeBIT, but also to do our regular work and the work that we normally should have done the next two weeks. Now, we’re almost there. Tomorrow we will load the truck with all material for the stand, and Monday morning we will drive to Germany. After two days of travelling we’ll have a day to construct everything and then… let the show begin! I don’t know what exactly we can expect but I am convinced that the show will be a big success for our company. I will tell you more in two weeks, when I’m back.

Out of respect for the victims and out of protest towards terrorism, today I put my site on black.

What happened this morning in Madrid is inhuman and cannot be justified. I can only guess for the reasons behind this horrible deed, but know that whatever they were trying to reach is not going to happen, in contrary.

If they wanted to put political parties up against each other, they failed, since all parties now form one front against terrorism.

If they wanted to show their strength, they will fail, since the government (whoever will win the elections the coming weekend) will be very convinced in finding the people behind this attack.

I cincerely hope that the Spanish government does the right thing as a reaction to the events today, without limiting the rights of the Spanish inhabitants.

Maybe I am convinced

Just a small message to give you the possibility to congratulate me. 😉

Sometimes I post comments on my own pages, usually in reaction to other comments. I usually use only my first name ‘Jeroen’ to post these comments, but everybody is free to use any name he/she wishes, including my first name. After all, I am not the only Jeroen in the world.

But how do you know that it was really me who posted the comment? From now on all my comments are PGP signed, so you can verify them with my public key. This way you know for sure that the poster of the message is the same guy as the one who created this site.

Of course you are free to sign your own comments as well.

How wonderful!!! In these times of stress we receive an extra day for free!

Let’s enjoy it… 😀

Today it is raining in Lleida. So what? Well, the problem is that the people over here are not used to rain. When it is raining, the people simply stay inside until the rain is over.

When I drove this morning past the market square, I could see all merchants waiting inside their cars, still packed. They were waiting for the rain to stop, because their clients won’t show up when it is raining. I was imagining that Dutch merchants would have the same mentality; they would only be able to sell during some weeks in summer! But that is mainly because the Dutch clients are used to the rain; they simply have to.

Of course there are situations in which even the Dutch people stay at home, and the amount of snow today created such a situation. The Dutch only stay at home when it is impossible to get out.

Unfortunately, my parents have to catch a flight to Barcelona in a few hours, so at this moment they are desperately trying to get to the airport. I just checked the news, but there are no trains going to Amsterdam and there are huge traffic jams on all highways. I really hope they are able to make it in time!!! 😱

[Update 2004.02.26]: They managed to get to Schiphol airport by train, and I assume they have arrived safely in Barcelona. Just a few hours more, and I will meet them. 😉

Today I received the following message in my mailbox:

an improper scan has caused a ban on your site date: Tue Feb 24 18:30:20 2004 ip: 66.77.73.32 host: shop-gw.sac.overture.com agent: Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler

I regulary receive this kind of messages, usually created because bad robots or script kiddies access my spam trap. But Yahoo and Overture are well respected companies, and I would assume that they would have respected my robots.txt file, in which I explicitly deny access to the /private folder:

User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /dummy/dummy.html Disallow: /errors Disallow: /fimcap Disallow: /js Disallow: /mailtemplates Disallow: /mt-static Disallow: /private Disallow: /spam

So I looked in my access log and found that they indeed violated my robots file!!

66.77.73.32 - - [24/Feb/2004:17:20:24 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 758 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler" 66.77.73.32 - - [24/Feb/2004:17:57:22 -0500] "GET /private/ HTTP/1.0" 200 4815 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler" 66.77.73.32 - - [24/Feb/2004:18:30:20 -0500] "GET /private/welcome.html HTTP/1.0" 200 351 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler"

Notice that the page mentioned in the User Agent string states that Yahoo-Overture does support the robots exclusion protocol!

That is an awfully big gray area!!! I guess I still have some traveling to do 😀

Notice that a holiday in a small part of the US of A made a big difference, since the whole country is marked red after visiting only 2 states: The fastest way to fill my map would be to make some strategical visits to Canada, Russia, Greenland, Brazil or China.

The other way would be to go for the biggest number of countries, and in that case traveling through Europe is the way to go:

(Hat tip: hightext)

[Update 2004.02.23]: Added USA and Europe maps. [Update 2004.09.27]: Added Cyprus and Thailand.

It has been very silent on this site lately.

This was not because I did not have time to write; it only takes about five minutes to write some lines.

This was not because I did not have anything to write about; I could have written about using Zempt for posting on this site, about the political situation in Spain, about my parents coming to visit me this week, about the fimcap.org server migration…

The only reason for my silence is that I did not feel like writing. But now I’m back again! I promise

That the pixies are going to tour again is old news. The problem is finding the tour schedule, it simply does not exist. So I googled a little bit, and made the following scheme. Surely it is still incomplete, so if you have any additions or corrections, please let me know.

[Update 2004.02.10]: Added links and comments [Update 2004.02.12]: Added US & Canada tour dates [Update 2004.03.03]: Added more gigs [Update 2004.03.03]: I just found out that the pixies finally have an unofficial tour page, so I won’t update this scheme anymore.

Sometimes people ask me why this site is called ‘Brain Tags’.

Well, the origin comes from a nice song of Bettie Serveert called Brain Tag. Of course the word Tag links nicely to my interest in web development, while people knowing me only a little bit realise that the word Brain has no link to me at all…

How does this rhyme, cause every time I see you well, I could swear, must've met you somewhere Down under lock and key, there's a brain-tag to every secret If I could keep my mind shut, there's a chance that I might even keep it You feel familiar and I wanna feel some more Have I ever laid my hands on you before This must sound weird, it's like you peered inside me cause every time, you recognise my state of mind Down under lock and key, we put a brain-tag to every secret Now comes the time to figure out whether we should keep it You feel familiar and I wanna feel some more Have I ever laid my hands on you before Total freedom beneath the waves Floating through the arcane waves Synchronised in space and time Leaving all desire behind

When entering a comment in a Movable Type powered site, a radio button is available telling you that it is going to ‘Remember personal info’. However, sometimes when you come back to the same site and want to write another comment, all fields are empty. Your personal info has not been saved… 🙁

The problem I described above appears regularly on the Movable Type support forum, and since the answer is always the same, I created this explanation, so I only have to point here to answer the question.

First a small explanation on how the system is supposed to work. If you enter a comment and select the ‘Remember personal info’ radio button, your name, address and URL are stored in a so-called cookie on your computer. This cookie contains the domain of the site, the directory for which the cookie is valid, an expiration date, and of course the stored value. For example, if I post a comment on an entry of this site, a cookie with the name mtcmdhome will be created with the following information:

Name: mtcmdhome Content: http%3A//example.com/ Domain: .jeroensangers.com Path: / Expires: 28-01-2005

This will make sure that the URL I entered (http://example.com/) will be stored for one year, and can be used by any page on the .jeroensangers.com sites.

MT sets this cookie using JavaScript, which you can find in the Individual Entry Archive template. You can find this script at line 29 of the default template.

By default, the script does not specify a path for the cookie, so that the cookie is stored using the path of the individual entry page. So the cookie of this page would only be valid for pages in /2004/01/mt_does_not_remember_personal_info, which is only one page. Since the cookie is not valid for my other pages, the details I filled in when commenting on this page won’t show up in other pages. Note that the default MT installation places all archives in a single directory (e.g. /archives), so this problem does not appear.

If you do place your archives into different directories, you’ll have to need to adjust the JavaScript in the template to fit your situation. The key is that you need to specify the directory for the cookie depending on the set-up of your site. If you have your own domain like I have, you can set it to ‘/’ to be valid for the whole domain. If you use a directory on the domain of your provider (e.g. http://example.com/username/), you can set it to ‘/username’.

To set the directory for the cookies, edit the functions rememberMe and forgetMe in your template. The location for the path has to be inserted between the two apostrophes before HOST. The original code is:

function rememberMe (f) { var now = new Date(); fixDate(now); now.setTime(now.getTime() + 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000); setCookie('mtcmtauth', f.author.value, now, '', HOST, ''); setCookie('mtcmtmail', f.email.value, now, '', HOST, ''); setCookie('mtcmthome', f.url.value, now, '', HOST, ''); } function forgetMe (f) { deleteCookie('mtcmtmail', '', HOST); deleteCookie('mtcmthome', '', HOST); deleteCookie('mtcmtauth', '', HOST); f.email.value = ''; f.author.value = ''; f.url.value = ''; }

The code for http://example.com/username/ becomes:

function rememberMe (f) { var now = new Date(); fixDate(now); now.setTime(now.getTime() + 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000); setCookie('mtcmtauth', f.author.value, now, '/username', HOST, ''); setCookie('mtcmtmail', f.email.value, now, '/username', HOST, ''); setCookie('mtcmthome', f.url.value, now, '/username', HOST, ''); } function forgetMe (f) { deleteCookie('mtcmtmail', '/username', HOST); deleteCookie('mtcmthome', '/username', HOST); deleteCookie('mtcmtauth', '/username', HOST); f.email.value = ''; f.author.value = ''; f.url.value = ''; }

After making these small changes, the cookie is valid for your whole site, and the details filled in when creating a comment show up on all the pages.

I am going to the CeBIT!

This year will be the first year that our company will have a stand at Europe’s biggest technology fair in Germany. And I can tell you that it takes a lot of work to organise everything.

As we are a do-it-ourselves shop, I’ve had many meetings in which we were making sketches for the stand, writing texts for press announcements and thinking about all details involved in this project.

At this moment we are finishing the product catalogue, which is being translated into English and German. Our main interest is finding new European dealers for our software , but in case end-users visit our stand, we have some Dutch and German dealers present to help them with a complete solution.

We still have a lot of preparations to do, but I am sure that we will be able to make some impact over there. For those readers who are going to visit the CeBIT this year: you can find us in hall 1, at stand 7N8.

Configure a (Windows) computer to use a DHCP and static IP address at the same time.

Today version 2.66 of Movable Type has been released, which addresses amongs others some of the comment spam issues.

I installed the update, and wrote a test comment to see how it works, but the entry did not show up anymore. Mozilla told me that there was a XML parsing error, and since I am serving my pages as application/xhtml+xml, Moz did not parse the page at all. I quickly changed my server settings so that my pages are served as text/html, and looked into the code.

The problem is that MT is now using a proxy script to link to the sites mentioned in comments, so spammers do not receive any ‘Google Karma’ by posting comments. The problem lies in the use of & in the URL, while they should have used &. For example, a link to this site appears as:

http://jeroensangers.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cmts.cgi?__mode=red&u=http%3A%2F%2Fjeroensangers.com%2F"

while they should have used:

http://jeroensangers.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cmts.cgi?__mode=red&u=http%3A%2F%2Fjeroensangers.com%2F"

I did a quick search in the new files, and found the error in the file lib/MT/Template/Context.pm at line 1189. Just add 4 characters, and MT produces valid HTML again.

[Update 2004.01.16]: Six Apart published MT version 2.661 to fix this problem.

Using the service from Mfop2 I am now able to post my messages from any place I want.

All I have to do is send an e-mail (including images if I want) with some special fields to Mfop2, and it will automagically appear on my site!

Now that I have my GPRS connection activated on my cellphone, this means that I can even do this from my phone.

After 7 years of intensive use, time has come to say goodbye to my old PC. It simply has too much technical problems: I assume problems with the power supply, the memory and the CPU! As a result, my screen freezes frequently, usually when I am using Microsoft software.

So last Saturday I took the step and ordered a new PC. Just like the one I have now it is a low-budget (€500) white label box, which I hope will also last the same number of years. The box I ordered has the following specifications:

• Intel Celeron 2,4 MHz
• 512Mb RAM
• 80Gb Hard disk
• DVD player
• DVD/CD-RW writer